dossier: contemporary lebanese art

Dossier:

Contemporary Art from Lebanon

Curated by W alid Sadek

G raphic D esign by Rasha Kahil

(inspired by the work of Raed Yassin)

U

57

WALID SAD E K F BU IL D ING W IT H O BS T A C L E S

where names never seem to linger long enough to become a

source of knowledge. The living of names here is often

violently interrupted. O ne may say that Beirut is twofold: A

receptacle of abandoned names and an excess of tangibility. It

is names afloat over neighborhoods and apartment buildings

constructed out of previous rubble, a mix of fragments. Beirut

is a city built with impedimenta, namely with obstacles carried

like the heavy luggage some of us drag in airports as we envy

those who pass us by carrying nothing but a light handbag.

It is told that Ishtar, queen of the heavens, descended into the

world of the dead in search of her handsome husband

Tammouz (July) taken captive in a world without light, where

the dead don robes made of feathers, fly with bat-wings, eat clay

and drink mud1. It is also told that Ishtar is finally reunited with

her husband under the radiant sun. This is myth. But from the

point of view of the older writers and younger image makers

grouped in this dossier, it is myth read unevenly. For all write

and picture without hope for a resolution, without hope for a

future with stable places and referential names. What they do is

persist in writing and picturing within proximity, even if not

within view, of that supposedly gaping orifice that leads into the

under world.

U

56

NA K E D P U NC H B ISSU E 0 8

This is July 2006. We see destruction. We look at ruins and

practice naming. This is H aret H reik. O r at least, this must

be H aret H reik. This is H ey Al Sillum or at least this must be

it. To name a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburb

today requires an act of faith. A ruin cannot carry a name.

What was a neighborhood with addresses becomes corpse-

like when ruined. And corpses do not have names even if

they remain poignantly tangible. In this devastation that is

our city, names have become the uttered sounds of our

surmising. O ne may say that the brutality of the Israeli army

is a fact we have experienced before. O ne may also say that

the complexity and instability of local Lebanese politics is a

fact we have lived with and often died for. O ne may say that

this is part and parcel of our knowledge - with teeth grinding

it is our knowledge indeed. And yet what we do not know or

at least can never claim as part of our gumption is the act of

naming. For naming is always an investment in the future

even if we know quite well that names are fated to be

abandoned by us as we are fated to be abandoned by places.

We name because we cannot but love the future.

And although the current war on Lebanon is devastating, it

must be said that we have been surmising when naming for

quite some time, at least since the early 1990’s. Rebuilt from

ruins or ruined again, this Lebanon seems like a country

BUILDING WITH OBSTACLES--> By Walid Sadek

1. From “N ouzoul Ishtar Ila

Al A‘alam Al Sufli” (Ishtar’s

descent into the under world)

in Malahem Wa Asateer Min

Al Adab Al Sami (Epics and

M yths from Semitic

Literature), Translated by Anis

Freiha, Dar Annahar, Beirut,

1967, p. 207.

U

59

1. The Age of Fascination

A few years ago and already an epoch away, there stood, stretched across

a billboard at the far end of Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut, a large

image showing the future of that square. In its location the image

appeared as a terminal statement: A destination, constructed according

to the conventions of pictorial perspective, into whose visual pyramid

precipitated what was then an ambiguous terrain that began somewhere

beneath the Fouad Chehab bridge and tended toward the sea, hesitant-

ly and without purpose. Landed, that image did more than simply

announce a promising future for an arrested terrain: It inhaled the actu-

ality of the terrain through the funnel of its converging lines and into the

future of its own visual depth. Rather than promise a picture of a feasi-

ble development out of current conditions, that image stood as an

accomplished future looking down upon a protracted and derelict pres-

ent turned dumb and tangible because reduced to a primary materiality

of dust and asphalt. The radical disjunction between the visible present

and the visual future promoted that image to the rank of a vision whol-

ly unrelated to the promise of representation. For although

perspectivally constructed, that image did not provide an adequate

FROM IMAGE TO CORPSE;a short story about 15 years of the 1990’s--> By Walid Sadek

U

61

WALID SADEK F FR OM IM AGE TO COR PSE

that folded the accumulated past underneath a purely visual preface, a

prologue without a speech, an event without consequences, divorced

and unbetrothed.

That image, one may add, was malefic. Not only because

unconcerned with the passions of redemption and indifferent to the

binary structures of authenticity and superficiality but also, and more

importantly, because it fascinated. And when fascinated, we the viewers,

slip into a temporal suspension and feel as if bathing in the plenitude of

an object-less perception. If one may speak here of a near death, then a

painless death it is, without corporeal protest and therefore ecstatic, in

the etymological sense of being out of place. When fascinated, as when

facing that image, we are in the presence of a figure without a ground,

an apparition with no background. The experience of the durability of the

world and the concomitant experience of an elastic temporality, which

usually allow us to speak of a past and of a future turn, when ek-static,

compact and immediate. The blissful and a-corporeal pleasure that this

image affords is precisely one of eliding the bipolar pull of time. It is then

of no accident that when removed, that image left no crumbs behind on

the floor of the actual terrain. Having promised nothing, it left nothing

behind. When it appeared it did so immaculately, never addressing our

expectations. And when it passed away, it did so imperceptibly. Yet if a

trace it did leave behind, then it must be all the walking dead, once

enamored by the fascination of this unannounced visitor, surviving now

in the midst of a disappointment.

To theorize this image as a vision is to propose that it stood for more

than just an emblem of a discourse on reconstruction. Much more than

a mere visual concoction, this image staged a moment of fascination in

which the future claims of reconstruction and the recollected past of

common heritage collapse. But how is it that an image can stage a

presence so forceful that an accomplished future is taken for granted

and a past is presumed and overlooked. In other words, what is the

structure of fascination?

U

60

NAKED PUNCH B ISSUE 08

reproduction of the visible world1. Nor did it address a supposedly

monocular observer grounded at the center of that visible world and

unto whose eye everything is expected to converge as to the vanishing

point of infinity2. Rather, it was an image that hovered above the ground

and was unconcerned with the visible world around it. And although it

pretended to visualize a future, it did so without concern for an observer

abandoned and without a clue on how to bridge the obvious but

un-addressed lack of kinship between the viewing ground and the vision

it offered.

If such an image may be said to hover it is because it appeared

irreferential. An image of a future city rid of secrets. A transparent city

schematically arranged for the free circulation of notations. A city radi-

cally oblivious to that specifically urban nourishment called secrets:

Nourishment that prods mistakes, solicits misunderstandings and thus

offers one the possibility to speak, divulge and so perhaps be redeemed.

Yet the reason for the forceful impression left by that image is

elsewhere. Its irreferentiality to the actuality of the city was an index of

the exorbitant but unavoidable cost of Beirut’s inevitable subscription to

a global economy capable of liquefying cities into exchangeable curren-

cy. In deploying an emblematic visual totality, that image announced,

unequivocally, that the city ought to enter into this economy if it is to

edge away from the brink of conflict and crisis. A rather haughty state-

ment: For while the city is called upon to pay the costly dues of that

subscription, that image stood untouched, in itself the fruit of an

immaculate conception with an already accomplished future.

Exorbitant as it may be, the annunciation of that image could

not be ignored. For it may be said that it afforded the viewer a rather

perverse pleasure. In its irreferentiality it appeared like a divinity, an

event inspiring awe and dread, both enviable and fearsome. It was even

embarrassing because so radically in disjunction with the tangible pres-

ent: A resurrection before which any inquiry about the provenance of the

resurrected is overwhelmed by the spectacle and collapses thereafter.

For it mattered not whence it came. What mattered was that it managed

to appear untaxed by the gateways of past, present and future.

Resurrected, it stood, visible but persistently unintelligible: An image

1. The operative word

here is ‘adequate’ and

is used in the sense

of a reproduction of a

‘possible’ world. See

Panofsky, Erwin,

Perspective as

Symbolic Form, Zone

Books, 1926, p. 29.

2. Berger, John, Ways

of Seeing, British

Broadcasting

Corporation and

Penguin Books, 1972,

p.16.

U

62


Now a certain man named Lazarus fell sick and died. He was the brother

of Mary and her sister Martha of Beit A‘anya. U pon hearing of the death,

Jesus said unto his disciples: “Our friend Lazarus sleeps; but I go, that I

may awake him out of his sleep.”3 U pon arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus

had lain in the grave four days already. Jesus therefore “groaning in

himself”4 came to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus

said, take away the stone. But Martha, the sister of him that was dead,

said unto Jesus, Lord, by this time he stinks: for he has been dead four

days.5 Jesus insisted. They took away the stone from the place where the

dead was laid. And Jesus cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth6.

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave-

clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said unto

them, loose him and let him go7.

This story is unique in the Christian New Testament for unlike

the resurrecting of Widow Na’een’s son8 and of Ya’eer’s daughter9, it

tells of a resurrection wherein Jesus calls back a dead from behind the

veil of the visible, from the moonless depth of a grave. The raising of

Lazarus from the dead is told in the Gospel according to St. John. Little

else is told of him except for what I consider to be a telling note, a coda,

in the chapter that follows informing the reader that he who was dead

sat at the table for supper along with Jesus, his disciples, Mary and

Martha10. It is precisely this added information, this coda which allows

us to think and theorize accordingly the structure of fascination. Let us

recapitulate:

He who was dead came forth. But none asked whether he who

is now alive is the same he who once was living. Lazarus returns. That is

all. Resurrected, he re-surges into the familiar and familial seat he once

occupied before his temporary death. With his sisters, Jesus and disci-

ples, he sits at the table for supper. It is only with this coda, this supper

with the resurgent Lazarus now in the familial seat that the resurrection

is made complete. With this coda, continuity is reinstated in the place of

rupture where grief laid heavily for four days. The object of grief

re-surges to dispel the traces of that grief. What is remarkable in this

story of a resurrection is that it stages the appearance of the radically

other in the place of the familial and the guise of the familiar. Instead of

U

63

WALID SADEK F FROM IMAGE TO CORPSE

mourning and remembrance, both of which are activities that involve

temporal layering and hybrid chronologies, a presence is reinstated.

Returning from the invisibility of the grave, Lazarus sits visible suppos-

edly fulfilling the promise that a return is not only possible but that it can

also measure the distance back home. He returns to occupy his place

seemingly unhindered by the passage in time through the gate of death,

namely across the threshold of radical otherness. The resurrected

Lazarus is fascinating because he returns unhindered, or in more precise

terms, because he appears.

The image that stood stretched at the far end of Martyr’s

Square also appears. Moreover, it appears in downtown Beirut, in the

centre of the city. The feast that it announces is open to all and without

entrance fee if not that of fascination. And yet what is this figure appear-

ing in the place of Lazarus, what is this returnee unto the seat of the

familial? In parallel we ask, what is this Lazarian image, this appearance

in Beirut’s city centre? And is it possible for us to approach and live with

it while maintaining still our belief in the veracity of the relationship

between figure and ground?

2. The Ways of the Corpse

Concerning Lazarus, the gospel according to St. John provides no further

mention. Nor do the other three gospels. Rather, it is in the work of

novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, in his The Last Temptation of Christ11 that the

story of Lazarus is given a poignant and disturbing extension. In the

novel, Lazarus does not vanish behind that posthumous supper. Rather,

he is described and given corporeality. In other words, the fascinating

appearance of the radically other in the place of the familial and familiar

is approached and pursued. In the novel we read that the people of Beit

A‘anya congregated in and around the house of Mary and Martha to see

and touch this man returned to life, this revenant: “Lazarus was sitting

tired, leaning against the darkest corner in his home. Light bothered him.

H is legs, arms and belly were swollen and greenish like a four day old corpse.

3. The Gospel

according to John 11: 11.

4. The Gospel according

to John 11: 38.


to John 11: 39.


to John 11: 43.


to John 11: 44.


to Luke 7: 11-17.


to Mathew 9:18-26.

10. The Gospel accord-

ing to John 12: 1-2.

11. Kazantzakis,

Nikos, (1951) The

Last Temptation of

Christ, translated by

Osama Manzalgi as

,

Al Mada, Syria, 1995.

U

65

WALID SADEK F FROM IMAGE TO CORPSE

hurriedly unto the realm of the divine. It is as if the road that leads the

resurrected away from the darkness of the grave better head directly

toward the ambient light of the eternal. For when the resurrected is

brought back into the light of the sun, he returns and with him an

accelerated corpse. Lazarus is such an accelerated corpse. He returns not

from the past but from the future with time elapsed clinging to his with-

ering flesh. In this sense, Lazarus is time condensed. He returns with

excess time, the weight of which gnaws at his joints and eats his flesh.

This reading of Kazantzakis’ novel allows for an uncovering of history’s

materiality. It brings us within view of the open grave that is the history

of our civil war. Far from being inhumed, the unfinished and perhaps

irresolvable feuds of civil war float on the surface of this city’s quotidian

living. The corpse with which we cohabit is not the past recovered. It is

not a recollected, or exhumed, common heritage. Nor is it the object of

a consensual future project. Rather, the corpse is time condensed

because unregulated and un-spent. It is an excess of non-sequential

time accumulating into a present lived in extreme contiguity. The corpse

is where we live even if sporadically distracted by fascinating appear-

ances.

It is perhaps resonant to remark that the recognition of the

corpse as our companion, our mess-mate, became unavoidable follow-

ing the assassination of ex-prime minister Rafic Hariri on the on the 14th

of February 2005 and his burial in Martyr’s square in Beirut. It is there-

fore none too soon that we desist from claiming resurrections and

staging fascination and apply ourselves instead in learning the ways of

an allegorical future wherein the corpse is often near and always ours.

U

64


His bloated face was chapped, oozing a white slightly yellowish liquid stain-

ing the shroud that clung tight to his skin and wrapped around him. At first

he exuded a foul stench. Those approaching him had to shut close their

nostrils. G radually the stench subsided leaving only the smell of earth and

incense. Every once in a while, he would move his hand and undo some of

the grass entangled in his hair and beard while his sisters washed the dirt and

worms still stuck to his body.”12 Moreover, upon receiving Jesus come to visit,

“Lazarus attempted to stand but quickly gave up fearing that his creaking

pelvis might break. He extended his arm and touched the hand of Jesus with

the tip of his fingers. Jesus trembled. The hand of Lazarus was cold, black and

smelled of earth.” Jesus said unto himself: “This resurrected man teeters still

on the edge of life and death. The Lord is yet to conquer the stench that hides

in him. N ever has death shown its true power as it has in this man. And Jesus

was seized with fear and sadness.”13 Later in the novel, the end of Lazarus

comes at the hand of Barabas the zealot who lurks in the furze waiting in

ambush. He attacks the frail Lazarus and “grabs him by the throat but

quickly recoils in fear. For he felt as if he had taken hold of something extreme-

ly soft, like cotton, no – rather like air. His nails and fingers passed through it

causing not one drop of blood.”14 Barabas then grabbed him by the hair.

“But both the hair and his scalp fell in his hand. And the skull shone in the

yellowish light of the sun. Then he grabbed his arm and shook it violently “Say

you are a ghost and I will let you go”. But the arm broke off and fell into his

hand. He then grabbed him by the back of the neck pressed his throat against

a stone, drew his knife and cut. But the knife did nothing as if incising a bun-

dle of wool. The blood ran cold in the veins of Barabas and he wondered could

it be that I am slaughtering a corpse? … Finally, overcoming his fear, he

grabbed him from both extremities, just like one does when wringing a damp

cloth before hanging it to dry, wrung and shook him hard. Lazarus’ vertebras

came undone and he broke in two at the middle. Barabas hid the parts under

a furze shrub and ran away.”15

For Kazantzakis the corpse endures. Within the logic of his

novel the corpse functions as a corollary to the human suffering and cor-

poreal doubt that is Jesus. But if read against the grain, the novel

proposes that the return of Lazarus is not quite a resurrection. Or rather

that a resurrection cannot be complete unless the resurrected graduates

12. Ibid. p. 516

13. Ibid. p. 539

14. Ibid. p. 569

15. Ibid. p. 570

U

67

PAGE 01:

Upon that event, the city entered a time that was not its own. Rising each morning

with the world watching, the inhabitants realized, with the bitter belatedness of the

deceived, that entering such a time was more oppressive than the event itself. What

befell them was a public time they could not claim as theirs. A public time that set

their waking hour to the clock of the world and lit their mornings with the explod-

ing flash bulbs of a million cameras. The inhabitants, once struggling to become

citizens in their own city were suddenly hurled as props into a ceremony conduct-

ed by international media rather than interpolated as subjects.

It is not that the inhabitants found themselves running out of time. Rather, they duly

took leave of their daily jobs and quotidian worries and huddled together manufac-

turing a time that would not accumulate as theirs: A people turned into a crowd

reduced into living a single instance. An instant extended indefinitely by lamenta-

tion, wailing and grief enslaving thus the place of their living to this public time; An

exorbitant time beyond anyone’s capacity to shoulder and excessive because

unforeseeable.

Now they live, these inhabitants, dragging what remains of their disparate futures

behind what had already come to pass. Inducted into the time of a world watching

they saw their many temporalities suspended. For when the unforeseeable occurs,

time can no longer be claimed as one’s own.

Excerpts from

FILE: PUBLIC TIME--> The following are translated excerpts from File: Public Time, a collection of short essays and

aphorisms written by Bilal Khbeiz, Fadi Abdullah and Walid Sadek, presented first in Beirut as part

of Home Works III, a forum for cultural practices organized by Ashkal Alwan, November 2005.

These texts were written between the Fall of 2004 and Summer of 2005, a time when the Lebanese

were living the momentous consequences of several assassinations of major political figures, the

forced withdrawal of Syrian troops and a renewed involvement of U.S foreign policy in influencing

the future of the country.

U

69

KHBEIZ , ABDULLAH & SADEK F FILE: PUBLIC TIME

are without their concomitant crippling physical pain.

Among the living, few can tell of the horrible sensation of a fire that devours. Few have

experienced its intensity, its relentless bite on the skin and its suffocating heat once

extinguished. Our knowledge of burning is partial at best. And sharing in such pain can

strain the imagination. For how can one imagine a total pain, one that permeates

simultaneously the entire body? Could it be that the pain of burning is like the constant

and total presence of skin; the suffocating feeling of being locked in one’s own sens-

ing-skin. If so, then such would be a moment when skin turns against the person,

when a responsive cloak turns into an executioner. This of course is not an instance of

regression into barbarity as in the ‘snuff videos’ of El-Zarqawi but rather of facing the

horror of a body devouring itself.

PAGE 06:

Borges writes that the lottery did not prevail in the city of Babylon until it developed

into a total system that interpolates equally all male citizens as a pool of suspended

faculties which can, according to the logic of the lottery, be distributed over various

jobs, duties and labors. According to that logic, it was then possible for the

Babylonians to examine and test these faculties with various forms of incentives and

penalties. And so the storyteller begins by saying: “Like all men in Babylon, I have been

proconsul; like all, a slave. I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, imprisonment”.

He continues to say that like all, he was declared invisible for a lunar year and stole

bread with impunity. Thus appear the men in Borges’ Babylon a collection of faculties

and attributes. Or in more precise terms, they appear as physical bodies regularly

migrating from one capacity to another and from one attribute to another in all confi-

dence that this logic of alternation applies equally to all. Hence the lottery came to

stand justified once it prevailed as a complete system that organizes and manages the

relation between all the men and their bodies. It also stood as a just system once it

prevailed as a law that provides an encompassing framework for exchange and a punc-

tual system for alternation. Within such a system, physical bodies in Babylon’s lottery,

become malleable matter capable of assuming equally the weight of penalties and the

privileges of gains. And so the narrator is not unmindful of implicating himself when

clearly indicating a missing index finger on his right hand and a vermilion tattoo of the

second symbol Beth on his stomach which, “on nights when the moon is full, gives [him]

power over men whose mark is Gimmel” but subordinates him “to the men of Aleph, who

U

68


PAGE 05:

Upon hearing the news, students gathered in a small apartment in Paris and sat mes-

merised facing the TV screen. They filled the room with the smoke of cigarettes and

the moisture of apprehension. On the screen the charred corpse was vivid: An image

not only instant and live but also persistent and singular. (In images there is a sort of

carving: A frame and in it a focal point that captivates an eye.)

Among the talking heads of politicians, journalists and analysts, one voice was miss-

ing: that of the assassinated. It was not until the next day that one television station

began to broadcast excerpts from his latest statement and interviews. Could not the

media tolerate his voice on the day of his assassination? And when they did recall that

calm, slightly nasal voice why only in purified bits, in edited fragments?

What makes a voice is modulation and vacillation. Without essence, it is always

becoming, never present. And unlike an image it eludes fixity. The live images from the

scene of the crime were not only clear, denoting a death complete, they also signalled

the inevitable approach of one particular tomorrow. Accordingly, the image when res-

olute cannot but shun a voice that quivered still, a voice modulated by doubt and

resonant with hope.

Those who filled the streets on the day of the assassination and on the day of the fune-

real would not have responded to the appeal of the deceased had he been the one to

call upon them. In all likelihood they mobilised because of his silence. His deafening

silence initiated the advent of a new public time. A time that would replace the vivid

image of death with chosen excerpts and edited fragments of a voice now turned into

sound bites: didactic and repetitive.

And yet shall we keep in mind that speech can travel forth as it can also hurry back

and that the dumbness of the one murdered and his distant voice are but a call to

undo all zealousness.

PAGE 07:

Sharing the pain of others is metaphorical. Having experienced loss, pain and panic,

I can perhaps empathise with a weeping child and shed a tear. But these tears I shed

U

71

KHBEIZ, ABDULLAH & SADEK F FILE: PUBLIC TIME

fear. Entering from the back, assassination is faceless, looks not at its victim.

Assassination is persistent in ignoring the invitations of cameras. And in doing so it is

pure violence.

PAGE 15:

We often intuited contrary to popular opinion, that screens abrogate the public realm. At

most they beautify it and in doing so strive to dominate it expunging any image that may

falter or digress from a seamless didactic visuality. This we intuited. But we also knew

quite well that the public realm cannot be formed by the media. It cannot take shape nor

crystallize around the media that insists on inhabiting it as it claims to guard it.

Yet, following the event, gleeful faces on screens assured us that in keeping with the

process of the investigation one could actually find a rather enjoyable occupation

wherein even the bereaved can shed their grief and enter into the lighter space of

rumours. This space is what happens when the public realm is lived by proxy. When the

media turns the exchange of opinions between citizens into conjectures caught in a

web of dubiousness.

Living in the space of rumours may not be a local invention. Nevertheless it did oblige

us to abandon fact for conjecture. And although conjecture calls upon the intricacies of

rhetoric and wily stratagems, it certainly does suppress all emotions. The only permis-

sible display of emotion is that of glee at guessing right. Guessing and conjecturing

ourselves and our futures to death.

Living in the space of rumours undoes our last remaining and precious ambiguity: that

one can still have opinions and be citizen. Without this ambiguity we risk the following:

Firstly, we may no longer construct opinions or take stands. We may merely read and

compare the headlines. Events may no longer be made in cafes, pubs, streets and job

places. They may retire to closed rooms fit for weaving conspiracies.

Secondly, we may find ourselves having entered public time unprepared, as stuff for

experimentation: As mice in the laboratories of conjectures caught between accidental

death and disfiguration.

Translated by Karl Sharro and Walid Sadek.

U

70


on moonless nights owe obedience to those marked with Gimmel.”

The body in Borges’ story is ambivalent: It is malleable without being materially dumb.

Rather, it intimates. The missing index finger is an articulate absence. Visibly subtract-

ed, it documents knowledge born of experience. The body in Borges’ fable is matter

made of impressionable bodies: It is currency. A mischievous compression of informa-

tion and corporeal matter into an economy “where the accent is placed on a loss that

must be as great as possible in order for it to take on its true meaning.” Furthermore, this

economy is one of a protracted expenditure. It thrives on the manipulation and degra-

dation of the physical and organic according to an extended spectrum of additions and

subtractions. Here, freakishness is capital and productivity is self-consumption.

In Borges’ lottery bodies are kneaded with additions and subtractions. They are talka-

tive and always in excess. They prod and call to be acknowledged. With no use for pity,

they churn the carnivorous machination of the material world.

PAGE 11:

When assassinating, a man impersonates a god. He claims the ability to interfere from

the outside in the course of history and announces a last event, a sudden act to con-

clude all narratives. The violence of assassination lies in that its perpetrator is

confident that his act is without consequences.

Assassination among mortals is a reversal, a primitive act wherein the body is magical

matter. Assassination confounds for it hurls at us the bodies of persons we knew as

words. It is thus a crushing gift difficult to reciprocate unless we renounce on our

desire to be words and retreat to the stage of mere flesh. Assassination aims not at the

destruction of a stature or the erasure of a person. Rather it seeks to stuff a stature with

the corpse of a person.

Assassination is always sudden. It lands from where we know not and leaves us little

but slow living. It seems that assassination is capable of harming any leader or notable.

It also seems that it allows no shelter except for that of lowliness. The violence of

assassination lies also in that it makes all covet lowliness.

Assassination enters through the back door. Not to drag the head of this world down

towards its black luciferous orifice but rather to denude our backs and scorch it with

U

73

Given the many unjust and humiliating conditions that are the

daily experience of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, what

is the moment that suddenly felt unbearable for one or more

Palestinians, that stopped the interior monologue, that broke the

sensory-motor link?1 From June 2002, he, a Palestinian living in

the West Bank, followed with apprehension the news about the

construction by the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon of a

“Security Fence” ostensibly to block terrorist attacks. He saw the

“Security Fence” progress day after day, discovering that it was

actually an 8-meter-tall wall with razor-fringed fencing, watchtow-

ers every few hundred meters, and buffer zones on either side,

and that it encroached on substantial areas of the West Bank.

Remembering Nietzsche’s characterization of Jesus of Nazareth

as “the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the

fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike

India’s… ” (The Antichrist), he wondered whether one could be a

Taoist on a soil very unlike China’s, namely the West Bank2; and

whether, as in Taoism, where “the movements of the painter’s

brush must be interrupted [without interruption of the breath that

is animating them]” (Li Jih-Hua)3, a Palestinian could maintain

THE WRITINGIS ON THE WALL--> By Jalal Toufic, ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (Beirut,

Lebanon: Forthcoming Books, 2005), pp. 64-68

14. On the break of the

sensory-motor link, see

Chapter 1 of Gilles

Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The

Time-Image, trans. Hugh

Tomlinson and Robert

Galeta (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota

Press, 1986).

2. The one really beautiful

shot in Mel Gibson’s

excruciating The Passion of

the Christ, 2004, occurs in

the film’s last scene: sud-

denly, the crucified Christ

is filmed from a heavenly

perspective, with the sort

of detachment, colors,

rocks, haze, and, most

importantly, (“third full-

ness, two-thirds”)

emptiness that one

encounters most charac-

teristically in traditional

Chinese painting, so that

we move from a Semitic

to a Chinese atmosphere

and culture. It would seem

that high up, there is no

God but a sort of Taoist

Way of Heaven.

U

75

JALAL TOUF IC F THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL

exacerbated, would apply not only to those that refer to and/or

document the Palestinian past but also to those, archaeological

or otherwise, that contradict the Bible, and then to all books other

than the Bible, its orthodox interpretation(“s”) and the scientific

and technological publications presenting the latest advances in

certain cutting edge fields where Israeli scientists are making a

significant contribution, for example nanotechnology.6 At that

point any Israeli who concealed books other than the aforemen-

tioned allowed ones would be condemned to work, until the day

of his or her death, on the Wall of Separation, which would be

constantly in need of repair since repeatedly sabotaged at various

points by its victims, the Palestinians. Elsewhere in the same text,

Borges writes: “Perhaps Shih Huang Ti condemned those who

adored the past to a work as vast as the past, as stupid and as

useless.”7 Similarly, perhaps Ariel Sharon is unwittingly condemn-

ing those in Israel who adore the past, namely the settlers in the

Occupied Territories, who base their territorial claims on the

Bible, to “a work as vast as the past, as stupid and as useless.”

He wondered whether, as with the Great Wall of China (aka

10,000 Li Long Wall), which was added to the UNESCO World

Heritage List in 1987, the Security Wall (aka the Security Fence)

will, if completed, be added one day to the same list. It may in the

short term become a wailing wall for the Palestinians, but it is

likely in the long term to become another Wailing Wall for the

Israeli Jews, coming to rival and possibly to supplant the 50

meters long Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem (aka the

Western Wall), the only remains of the Second Temple destroyed

in 70, and which dates back to about the 2nd century BC (its

upper sections were added later). On 23 February 2004, as the

International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearings on the

legality of Israel’s Wall of Separation, he along with thousands of

other Palestinians as well as international peace activists

marched in protest against this Wall of Separation in various

towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.8 In rare

cases, one’s disconnecting of the Wall of Separation from the

U

74


the chi (vital breath/original energy) without a break despite

some 700 checkpoints operational in the West Bank and Gaza in

December 2003, which often closed for good for weeks, and

which even when open often took hours to cross— and now

despite the Wall of Separation. For a period of several weeks, he

was obsessed by Borges’ “The Wall and the Books”: “I read, a few

days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost

infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who

also decreed the burning of all the books that had been written

before his time4. That these two vast undertakings— the five or six

hundred leagues of stone against the barbarians, and the rigor-

ous abolition of history, that is, of the past— were the work of the

same person and were, in a sense, his attributes, inexplicably sat-

isfied and, at the same time, disturbed me.… Herbert Allen Giles

recounts that anyone who concealed books was… condemned to

work on the endless wall until the day of his death.”5 He thought

that one could paraphrase Borges’ words thus within the context

of Israeli politics: the man who ordered the building of the Wall of

Separation was that Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who also

decreed the burning of all the books relating to the Palestinians:

during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when Sharon was

Israel’s defense minister, the Israeli army seized and possibly

destroyed the archives of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut,

and during the Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza strip beginning in

late March 2002, Israeli military forces destroyed or seized the

computers, books, audio recordings, videos, institutional

archives and records housed in many Palestinian cultural

resources. That these two vast undertakings— the 788 kilometers

of stone against “the barbarians,” and the rigorous abolition of

history, that is, of the past of the Palestinian people— were the

work of the same person and were, in a sense, his attributes inex-

plicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed him. He

thought that sooner or later the destruction of books in an Israel

that was turning increasingly right-wing, militaristic, and chauvin-

istic, and whose initial racism was becoming even more

3. François Cheng, Empty

and Full: The Language of

Chinese Painting, trans.

Michael H. Kohn (Boston:

Shambhala, 1994), pp. 76-

77.

4. Actually in 213 BC, in

the China of Shih huang-

ti, “all books not dealing

with agriculture, medicine,

or prognostication were

burned, except historical

records of Ch’in and

books in the imperial

library” (Encyclopedia

Britannica).

5. Jorge Luis Borges,

The Total Library: Non-

Fiction 1922-1986, ed. Eliot

Weinberger; trans. Esther

Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine

and Eliot Weinberger

(London; New York:

Penguin, 2001),

pp. 344-345.

6. “A functional electronic

nano-device has been

manufactured using bio-

logical self-assembly for

the first time.… A team of

Israeli scientists [at the

Technion-Israel Institute of

Technology] harnessed the

construction capabilities

of DNA and the electronic

properties of carbon nan-

otubes to create the

self-assembling nano-tran-

sistor.” New Scientist, 20

November 2003.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, The

Total Library: Non-Fiction

1922-1986, p. 345.

8. I encourage the readers

of this book to sign the

online petition “Stop the

Wall Immediately” initiat-

ed by French philosopher

Etienne Balibar:

http://www.petitionon-

line.com/stw/petition.html

U

77

JALAL TOUFIC F THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL

bent upon, and relevant for an Arab to condemn in no uncertain

terms the indiscriminate killing by Palestinian suicide bombers of

Israeli civilians living within Israel’s 1967 borders (as well as both

the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and the targeted mass

killings of Shi‘ites in Iraq by suicide bombers from other Arab

countries, many of whom are Wahhâbîs)12 as long as these bomb-

ings are still reactions, whether political or revengeful or mimetic,

or all of these conjointly. It is irrelevant to condemn such bomb-

ings—but not the unbearable conditions that give rise to them in

the case of the Palestinians—when they are no longer reactions

but an unpredictable by-product of the breakdown of the sensory-

motor link, since while one can prevent a reaction, one cannot

prevent an event.

U

76


mendacious justifications for its construction leads to the discon-

nection of the sensory functions from the motor ones in a

breakdown of the sensory-motor link; more frequently, it is the

breakdown of the sensory-motor link that leads to a concomitant

disconnection of the Wall of Separation from not only the menda-

cious and mystifying justifications for its construction, but also

from all the real reasons for its presence (encroaching on

Palestinian territories; contributing toward rendering a viable

Palestinian state on the Occupied Territories impossible; mini-

mizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians; gaining political

votes, since, according to many polls, over 70% of Israelis are in

favor of the Wall of Separation, etc.). The Wall of Separation was

so unbearable to him that it broke his sensory-motor link9, i.e. dis-

connected the sensory functions from the motor ones, and

suspended his interior monologue, with voices and hallucina-

tions coming to insert themselves in the gap between the sensory

functions and the motor ones. Indeed, one not so fine day, while

going to visit a friend, something anomalous obstructed his

vision. It seemed to have suddenly appeared from one day to the

next. He approached it with much trepidation. Was it a wall (for

certainly it was not a fence)? Yes! It seemed never to end! Did it

reach China and envelope its Great Wall? Did it circle the Earth?

Was he losing his mind and hallucinating it? Or was he still sleep-

ing and dreaming it? And if he was dreaming even when he

thought he was awake, then how to wake up? He thought that this

could be achieved only by death, for didn’t the prophet

Muhammad say: “People are asleep, and when they die, they

awake”? A few days later, like others before him, he recorded a

video testimony10—the task in the prerecorded video testimony of

the one soon to embark on a bombing operation is to tell or inti-

mate to his or her addressees what he or she has seen. Later that

day, he blew himself up in a crowded bus, killing along with him-

self a number of Israelis (did the scene of the horrifying carnage

in turn produce a breakdown of the sensory-motor link of some

Israeli who happened to be passing there?)11. It is both incum-

9. The unbearable can be

borne by a Muslim not by

committing a veiled suicide,

which is prohibited in Islam

and which anyway will lead

him or her to death, where

one has piercing sight, but

by reaching a stage of fanâ’

(obliteration in God), in

which it is God who is “his

sight through which he

sees,” and God, Who creat-

ed the universe in which

such a thing can occur, can

certainly bear it.

It is only God (the

Father) Who, in his infinite

compassion, magnanimity,

etc., can withstand to be

insulted, tortured and then

crucified (in the person of

the Son). A (great) human

should not be able to with-

stand that this should

happen to God. The ordeal

on the cross could have last-

ed much longer, indeed until

the end of the world, had

not Jesus of Nazareth suc-

cumbed, and he succumbed

so quickly not because of

the torture he suffered and

the flagellation and the cru-

cifixion, but from not being

able to tolerate that (the Son

of) God, who had incarnat-

ed in him, should be treated

thus by low-lives (it is

reported that on viewing an

advanced screening of Mel

Gibson’s The Passion of the

Christ [2004], the Pope said:

“It is as it was”; I would like

to believe that he meant by

that not that Gibson’s film

shows the events as they

happened then, but that the

film itself is a reenactment,

by a low-life, of the torture

and crucifixion of Christ). It

is with the resurrection that

Jesus partook of God. Had

they tried to crucify the res-

urrected body of Jesus

Christ, then he would not

have succumbed until the

end of the world. So along

with being the becoming

human of God (Jesus

Christ), Christianity could

not but be the becoming

God of men and women so

that they would not perish

from considering what hap-

pened to God on the cross.

In films dealing with

monotheistic religions, the

filmmaker has no right,

unless he wants to assume

the status of God, to film

the events from an “objec-

tive” point of view, but has

to show the events from the

subjective points of view of

various “historical” witness-

es, with the consequence

that he will end up showing

only certain parts of what

happened, a fragmentary

rendering. For a filmmaker

to narrate his film’s events

from a perspective that is

both omnipresent (through

parallel montage) and

omniscient is to implicitly

assume the point of view of

God. We see this explicitly

and naively in Mel Gibson’s

The Passion of the Christ in a

symptomatic shot in the

scene of the crucifixion:

when Jesus gives up his spir-

it, the scene is suddenly

filmed from a heavenly per-

spective, from God’s view. A

filmmaker can legitimately

do so only if he has pro-

gressed so far on the

spiritual path as to have

attained the mystical station

of obliteration in God (the

Sûfîs’ fanâ’), for then his

camera shows events from

the perspective of God not

because the filmmaker

knows what God is seeing

but because he is absent

and God has become “his

hearing through which he

hears, his sight through

which he sees” (“My servant

draws near to Me through

nothing I love more than

that which I have made

obligatory for him. My ser-

vant never ceases drawing

near to Me through

supererogatory works until I

love him. Then, when I love

him, I am his hearing

through which he hears, his

sight through which he sees,

his hand through which he

grasps, and his foot through

which he walks” [a hadîth

qudsî]).

10. The statement “I am the

shahîd(a) [martyr] (name of

speaker),” with which, start-

ing with the Lebanese Sanâ’

Yûsif Muhaydlî, a number of

guerrilla fighters introduced

their prerecorded video testi-

monies, is paradoxical

whether said by a secular

person or by a Muslim. For

when a secular resistance

fighter, for instance a com-

munist, says it, he or she is

telling us that he or she is

dead! (See my essay “I Am

the Martyr Sanâ’ Yûsif

Muhaydlî” in the revised and

expanded edition of my book

(Vampires): An U neasy Essay

on the U ndead in Film

[Sausalito, CA: The Post-

Apollo Press, 2003]). And

when a Muslim resistance

fighter says it, he or she is

telling us that past the

bombing operation in which

he or she died physically he

or she is a living witness!

11. If martyrdom, whether

secular or Islamic, is related

to death, it is because being

a witness, the primary sense

of both martyr and shahîd, is

related to death: Islamic

martyrdom is related to

death because it is through

death that one has piercing

sight; and secular martyr-

dom is related to death

because it is through some

sort of breakdown of the

sensory-motor link that one

has a visionary view of reali-

ty, which vision may in

unfortunate cases be so

unbearable that the one who

undergoes it attempts or at

least entertains suicide.

12. In the first half of 2005,

at least 213 suicide attacks—

172 by vehicle and 41 by

bombers on foot—took

place in Iraq, according to

an Associated Press count.

It is estimated that less than

10% of the more than 500

suicide attacks that have

taken place in Iraq since

2003 have been carried out

by Iraqis.

U

79

F MICHEL HAY EK’S FOREBODINGS FOR 2006

What ever happened to 2006:The astrologer Michel Hayek's Forebodings for 2006

--> Surprises in June will change entirely the course of the probe into Hariri'sassassination

--> In July, the investigation into Samir Q assir's assassination will implicate members of Hizbullah, splintering the party's leadership into a Syrian and Iranian following.

--> The summer of 2006 will witness the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah byIsraeli helicopter gunship on the Lebanese-Syrian border as he flees Haret Hreik.

--> In late September, one of Emile Lahoud's sons will be apprehended andcharged with money laundering in a Europe principality. Lahoud will resign from presidency.

--> In early fall 2006, violent skirmishes between factions in the Palestinian camps will lead to war between Sunnis and Shiites in Sidon.

--> In Fall, Walid Jumblatt will be sentenced and hastily executed in an Arab capital,leaving the leadership of the Progressive Socialist Party to his son Taymour.

--> At the end of fall 2006 and sparked by the outcome of the international probeinto Hariri's assassination, Syria will undergo a coup d'état. Bashar Assad willdisappear and a majority of Syria's leaders will be handed to the international tribunal.

--> In September, the court processions into Hariri's assassination will begin with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri as star witness.

--> At winter's start, there will be a mass resignation from the Free PatrioticMovement in protest of the political arrest of General Michel Aoun. In early legislative elections, the Movement will lose all its parliamentary seats while Aounwill have a nervous breakdown and be transported for treatment to a Europeancapital, leaving the Movement's leadership to Jibran Bassil.

--> In October, Charles Rizk will be unanimously voted President of the Republic.

--> As the year draws to a close and following disputes within the Hariri family,the family will lose much of its investment in Europe and Turkey. Saad Hariri will return to Saudi Arabia to run the company there while Bahia Hariri will takecharge of the Future Movement becoming the first woman Prime Minister.

U

78


U

80


NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

WALID SADEK ([email protected]) --> Born in 1966, Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He has exhibited Love is Blind,2006; File: Public Time, 2005; Les Autres, 2001; Al Kassal, 1999, with writer Bilal Khbeiz; Bigger ThanPicasso, 1999; and Karaoke, 1998. He has also published a collection of essays entitled Jane-LoyseTissier, 2003. Sadek is currently assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and Design atthe American University of Beirut.

BILAL KHBEIZ ([email protected])--> Born in 1963, Bilal Khbeiz is a writer, poet and artist living in Beirut. He is the author of two poetrybooks, A Memory of Air, Perhaps, 1991; and Of My Father’s Illness and the Unbearable Heat, 1997; three collection of essays, That the Body is Sin and D elivrance, 1998; Globalization and the Manufactureof Transient Events, 2002; and The Enduring Image and the Vanishing World, 2004. He is an editorial secretary for the cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily Annahar.

JALAL TOUFIC (www.jalaltoufic.com)--> Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and artist. He is the author of D istracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003),(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996),Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love D ies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m D ying to Tell You(2005), and ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005). His videos and mixed-media works havebeen presented internationally, such as in New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Kassel andAthens. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC,and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie.

FADI EL ABDALLAH

--> Born in 1976 in Tripoli, Lebanon, Fadi El Abdallah is a poet and essayist. He has published two collections of poetry; A Stranger with a Camera in his Hand, Dar Al Jadid, Beirut, 1999;and The Hand of Intimacy, Dar Al Intishar Al Arabi, Beirut, 2001. He is a frequent contributor to thecultural supplements of the local dailies Al Safir and Annahar. He co-wrote File: Public Time, 2005, withBilal Khbeiz and Walid Sadek. He currently resides in Paris studying for a PhD in Law.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

JEAN-NOEL AOUN ([email protected])Licence en Arts Plastiques et Arts Appliqués from the Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA), 2006.

MANDY BOUCHEDID ([email protected])BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut, 2006.

SAMAR KANAFANI ([email protected])MA in Anthropology from the American University of Beirut, 2005.

MAYA RIZKALLAH ([email protected])BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut, 2005.

ZEINA TAWIL ([email protected])BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut, 2005.

LEBANESE CONTEMPORARY ART DOSSIER:

--> Jean-Noel Aoun

--> Zeina Tawil

--> Mandy Bouchedid

--> Maya Rizkallah

--> Samar Kanafani

U

82

U

83

LEBANESE CONTEMPORARY ART DOSSIER NAKED PUNCH B ISSUE 08

JEAN-NOEL AOUN F #002 (left) and #015 (above) from the series Beirut Medusa30 x 45 cm each, photography, 2006, part of an on-going project of texts and photographs

entitled Beirut Un-Scene, 2006

U

84

U

85


F On Track: Walking the Grotesque (right)

ZEINA TAWIL F On Track: Walking the Grotesque (left),

two-screen video installation, 5:20 mn loop, 2005

U

86

U

87


F “Naked Woman” (plate #25) from the series Margins

MANDY BOUCHEDID F “Breathing Space” (plate #70) from the series Marginspaper cut-out, photo transfer and lettraset, 12.9x19.6 cm each, 2006


U

89

LEBANESE CONTEMPORARY ART DOSSIER

U

88

F plate #8 from the series Ink on Paper

MAYA RIZKALLAH F plate #6 from the series Ink on Paper paper cut-out, photo transfer and lettraset, 12.9x19.6 cm each, 2006

U

90

U

91

F still from Mounzer

SAMAR KANAFANI F still from Mounzervideo, 12:35 mn, 2001

U

93

F GILBERT HAGE

U

92


featured artist

Gilbert Hage

F Sara Saliba F Jad Eid

U

95

F GIL B E R T H A GE

U

94

NA K E D P U NC H B IS S U E 0 8

F Yves Atallah F Charbel Fakhry

U

97

F GILBERT HAGE

Sitting for “Ici et Maintenant” (Here and Now) is a

q u ick and em otionless ex p erience. In a dim b asem ent

stu dio, th ere is a b lank b ack grou nd, a cou p le of ligh t

sou rces and a ch air facing a m ediu m -form at cam era on

a trip od. Y ou sit, and fu m b le a b it wh ile h e adju sts th e

h eigh t of lens. Th ere is u su ally silence. Th en h e ask s

y ou to look into th e cam era. Sh ou lders b ack , h ead

h igh , b ack straigh t, and look into th e cam era. Look

deep in th e cam era. Head aligned with y ou r sp ine ax is.

Th ink of noth ing. Look into th e lens… Look b ey ond th e

lens… B ey ond th e lens.

A nd th e ligh t p op s with th at little wh irring noise, once,

twice, and b efore y ou k now it, it’s all ov er.

Ten m inu tes at b est.

In a way , th at m ay b e wh y th e im p osing p ortraits,

once p laced with in th e contex t of an ex h ib ition (sh ot

on a six b y sev en film , th ey are su b seq u ently b lown

u p to 17 5 x 150 cm ), seem to stare th rou gh y ou , as

op p osed to into y ou r ey es. Th eir gaze is not th at of a

com m u nicativ e ey e-lock , and th ey don’t seem to h av e

any th ing to say , m ost p rob ab ly b ecau se th ere is no

dialogu e du ring th e sh oot itself. Th e gaze is alm ost

b lank , y et it is ch arged with a su b stance and p oise

th at ev entu ally dem arcates th e p ortraits from a com -

m on “p assp ort p ictu re” analogy th at an u n-discerning

v iewer m ay call u p on th em . Th e gaze of each of th e

p ortraits p ierces th rou gh th e v iewer and into th e

sp ace b ey ond.

W h en th e sh oot is ov er, y ou state y ou r fu ll nam e on a

p iece of p ap er. A nd th en y ou are wh isk ed ou t into th e

su n and on y ou r way to wh erev er y ou cam e from …

A ll of th e eigh t su b jects sh ot b y Hage, lik e h im , are

Leb anese. More sp ecifically , th ey are p art of th e p ost-

war generation, not u nder 18, not ov er 30 (seem ingly ),

wh o h av e b een b lessed with th e b u rden of h av ing to

define wh at “b eing Leb anese” really m eans. Hav ing

tau gh t p h otograp h y at th e USEK and at A L B A u niv ersi-

ties in B eiru t ov er th e p ast 10 y ears, Hage is constantly

su rrou nded b y wh at h e refers to as a “y ou th seek ing

m otiv ations”. A nd to p ossess m otiv ations, one needs to

h av e m ore or less form ed an identity . B u t, in a Leb anon

renowned for its cu ltu ral, religiou s and class ju m b le,

h ow easy is it to forge an identity th at detach es itself

from th at of th e cou ntry itself, in a day and age wh en

b eing an A rab h olds m eaning b ey ond th at of th e indi-

v idu al?

Each of th e p ortraits carries an identity b orne from

th eir nam e. Th ey are Jad Eid, Sara Salib a, or Y v es

A tallah . Th ey are not anony m ou s faces, b u t stare defi-

antly across th e room with an identity th at is fact, y et

illu sory . Th e nam e is th e only sign th at can engage th e

v iewer in dialogu e with th e su b ject, y et it rem ains a

nam e. It is an ob stacle to stereoty p ing inasm u ch as it

offers clu es, h owev er m u ch inv alidated, to re-p lace

th e p erson into a m ou ld. Hage say s: “I am th orou gh ly

conv inced th at h u m an face or th e p ortrait is neith er

determ ined or real; h owev er it is recep tiv e, flex ib le

and su b jected to ch anges. It oscillates b etween reali-

ties and illu sions. Hu m an ex p ressions are only

defined cu ltu rally and stru ctu red socially .”

In ligh t of th e recent ev ents th at sh ook th e cou ntry

once again, th e p ost-war generation is still in a p ost-

war tim e, wh ich legitim izes ev en m ore th e scop e of

Hage’s work . Th e selected p h otograp h s are actu ally

p art of a b igger p lan of com p iling u p to 1000 p ortraits

in v iew of a m ajor ex h ib ition one day . A lready ex h ib -

ited in B eiru t as well as in B erlin’s Hou se of W orld

C u ltu res in 2004 (as p art of a conference on glob aliza-

tion and identity ), th e work continu es to sp eak in

term s of th e carv ing of a contem p orary Leb anese self.

A s p art of th e Leb anese p ost-war generation m y self,

and with m y p ortrait h anging b igger th an life-size, I

m ay ju st b e ex trap olating… Hage conclu des b y say ing

th at “I intend to seize th e frontier th at ex ists only

anth rop ologically ”, p rojecting faces th at are link ed

only b y th eir land and “Leb anese” ap p ellation, and b y

th e fate of h av ing grown-u p in a cou ntry finding its

feet. No m ore, no less.

So m ay b e th e econom y of words wh en sitting for G ilb ert

and th e inconstant gaze of th e su b ject say it all.

Gilbert Hage is represented by the Tanit Gallery, Munich, and has

exhibited in Lebanon, Syria, France, Germ any and Brazil. He is cur-

rently working on a project about the July 2006 events in Lebanon.

Gilbert teaches photography at USEK and ALBA universities in Beirut.

www.gilberthage.com

U

96


F Rasha Kahil

Beyond the Lens. << by Rasha Kahil

dossier: contemporary lebanese art

Documents

h reik

referential names

itis names

living of names

e swhere names

mustbe h

h o bs t

areceptacle of abandoned